"Earlier this month benchmarks were published on Phoronix
showing the GCC 4.6 compiler performance with AVX support under Intel's
new Sandy Bridge processors that are the first to provide Advanced
Vector Extensions support. The Core i5 2500K CPU performance is already
great under Linux, but once more Linux software supports taking
advantage of this latest cross-vendor instruction set, there will be
even more speed-ups. While the Low-Level Virtual Machine does not yet
have full support for taking advantage of the Advanced Vector Extensions
support, in this article we are looking at how the latest development
code for LLVM 2.9 and the Clang compiler are performing on Intel's Sandy
Bridge in relation to GCC."